Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (22 page)

And different because one day, I imagined a touch that was not my own but that of another woman, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about. I imagined unbuttoning my blouse to her, closing my eyes as her fingers reached in to lightly brush my left nipple—the sensitive one—just a whisper of touch. I touched myself there, need and want spiraling through me, down into the deepest part of me. I imagined her hands moving over me as I reached for her, drunk with desire, saying
yes, go ahead, I am yours
. I had never imagined kissing another woman, but now I did, wanting to know the gentleness of soft skin, the taste of female, this female.

This is crazy, I told myself. A diversion. A backlash against my husband. A secret, wicked little fantasy that will pass.
What are you doing? Carolyn Heilbrun has titillated you with her talk of female friendships and women loving each other.
I might have been offended by these ideas two years before, six months before, maybe last month. But now they seemed wondrous, at least with Trish, and I felt myself wanting to go there, to experience it for real.

That fall, for a road trip to visit my parents in North Carolina, I checked out a book on CD from the library. The title was
She Is Me
by Cathleen Schine, and I knew nothing about it except what the turquoise cover revealed: three women, a mother, daughter, and grandmother, and a line about the unexpected twists and turns of their lives. What unfolded as I made my way through Virginia and across my home state proved so uncanny, I longed to bypass my exit and drive to the end of the story.

I was spellbound as the story unfolded: Greta, age fifty-three, married, unexpectedly falls for another woman. It was as if a benevolent voice was speaking to me through the story, offering reassurance that my new feelings were okay, normal even. Greta spoke my own fears:
What is happening to me? I’m not a lesbian—am I? How can this be? What would my family say if they knew?

Back at home, tensions were so high “divorce” might as well have been scrawled all over the walls. Separately and without discussion, we each took off our wedding rings. I hoped Trish would notice, see me as available. I wanted her to know I was interested, but I had no idea how to do that.
How do women flirt with one another?
I wondered. I was so afraid of making a fool of myself, I went the opposite extreme, friendly but professional, keeping the focus on teaching matters rather than anything personal. But I longed to know the details of her life.
How does she spend her nights? What does she eat? Where does she live? What does she do on weekends?

She had no idea how I pined for her, how thoughts of her consumed me. When my noon class ended, I’d stop by the restroom to check my appearance, then dash up the stairs tingling with excitement, pausing outside the faculty lounge to collect myself. She always sat in the same place, opposite the door on the other side of the conference table, the place where my eyes went first. I felt like a giddy teen surging with newfound lust and extreme emotions. Later, I learned that a second adolescence is often brought on by the self-discovery of coming out to oneself.

Little by little, Trish opened up. She had recently split with her partner of nine years, confirming that she was both lesbian and unattached. She, too, was a writer—a poet and playwright. She knew more about teaching than I did. She worked in her family’s business and devoted her free time to rescuing animals; she even traveled to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina to help care for homeless cats and dogs. She was eleven years younger than I. She had always wanted children but it hadn’t worked out. With every new detail, I adored her more.

All the while, I watched myself with detached fascination, safe in the secret of my longing. Was I crazy to think that anything could ever happen between us? I had no idea, but I wanted to find out, letting this newfound desire take me where it would.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, our conversation lagged, offering me little to hold on to during the week that would pass until I saw her again. After she left for class, I slumped in my chair, bereft. I fiddled at the computer, checked my email, then succumbed to the horoscope link on my home page, as if in search of answers.

You thought the two of you were just friends, and you’ve been conducting yourself accordingly. While you’ve been worried about discretion, caution and not jumping the gun, they’ve been thinking about how to lure you closer. If either of you happens to be unavailable at the moment, however, be very, very careful, even if you’re sure you’re just flirting. You know how quickly an attraction can take off.

I wasn’t one to take horoscopes seriously or even read them on a regular basis. But this one spoke directly to me, lifting my sagging spirits. I stared at it, taking it in, and then suddenly, Trish reappeared.

“You’re back!” I blurted out. She sat, explaining she’d left her students to complete their class evaluations in privacy. We talked, more animatedly this time, trading stories about how we’d spend Thanksgiving. I listened, unable to take my eyes off her face, my own cheeks warm and prickly with the excitement of her. I wondered if I was blushing, if she could sense the elation that flooded every part of me. I knew she felt it, too. She had to. How could she not? It swelled in the air, flying about, palpable, almost visible. We spoke quietly, yet I was certain everyone in the room knew I was swooning, madly in love. I didn’t care.

She rose to leave, and my eyes followed her as she disappeared beyond the open door, something inside me stretching and pulling.

The night before Thanksgiving, my husband and I had the worst fight of our marriage. He was subdued and repentant for our Thanksgiving meal, but the next morning, he faced me in the kitchen and asked, “What do you want to do?”

It was his usual tactic for handling difficult topics. He put the question to me rather than stating his own position, a strategy that absolved him of any responsibility for the outcome. Nevertheless, I seized the moment.

“I want to get the house ready to sell, put it on the market, and split up.”

By that afternoon, I’d typed up a list of all the work that needed to be done on the house and posted it on the refrigerator. I wanted to be ready.

As the term moved into its last weeks, Trish told me she didn’t plan to teach the next semester. The days ticked away like a death march. I couldn’t let her just walk out of my life forever. Then, a plan. We’d never had a real opportunity to talk about our writing, though once or twice one of us had commented that we should. On the last day of school, I would suggest we meet for lunch after grades were in to talk writing.

I waited anxiously as the last day approached, afraid of bungling this final opportunity to secure a connection with Trish beyond work, afraid I would sound foolish, afraid of rejection. But I awoke that last morning to an unexplainable sense of peace and calm, a feeling of certainty that the day’s outcome was out my hands. It was as if a voice were assuring me that all would be well, that all I needed to do was relax and let the day unfold.

When Trish left the faculty room for her last class that afternoon, I didn’t say goodbye or suggest that we get together later. I knew she would come back after the class was over. She did. We talked for a while, end of semester chat. Then she got up to leave.

“Thank you for being my mentor,” she said, walking toward the door.

“I’ll miss you next semester. You’ve been my favorite mentee of all time.” My words sounded ridiculously corny.

Trish turned. Standing on the threshold of that open doorway, she looked at me and said, “We should get together and talk writing, maybe have lunch?”

Now, four years later, I still think of that fall as magical, miraculous, mystical even.
So much happened.
Yes, I left my husband for a woman, a woman who has claimed my heart with a love that is passionate, profound, soul-stirring. But the real story is about claiming my own heart. It is about the serendipity of circumstances coming together at precisely the right moment to find me standing before that door opening out to a self that is, at last, strong and safe and free.

We Don’t Do Stereotypes

Sabrina Porterfield

L
ooking back on my formative years, I keep thinking I will somehow magically find that exact moment when I realized
Hey! I like girls!

My fourteen-year-old self did get all breathlessly tingly whenever I watched the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox in the “Sweet Dreams” video; what with her angry orange buzz cut, sharkily seductive grin, and smacking pointer. However, I also spent much of the time I should have been studying algebra in Mr. McGlynn’s class writing stories with my friends about our imagined love affairs with various members of Duran Duran. While this might explain why I could barely manage a C in most of my math classes, it doesn’t really help me locate that stereotypical earth-shattering moment when I realized that girls were hot.

I didn’t date in high school. Not because I was against dating, per se, but I had the distinct teenage disadvantage of being both a brainiac and an introvert. My poor mother—herself well known as a boy chaser in her days of purloined cigarettes and Catholic school uniforms—could not understand it. I think she was in a state of despair over me. “Relax,” my father told her, “She’s got other things going on. She’ll date when she wants to.”

Never mind dating a boy. Dating a girl in my tiny hometown of less than three thousand people was not really going to happen either. That would have been the mark of rebellion, and frankly, I was too busy trying to keep my grades up so I could get the hell out of Dodge to bother with any of that. I had places to go and things to see. The way I figured it, all of the normal teenage rebellious drinking and drugging and screwing hoopla could wait until I was safely away in college. The closest I ever came to being a rebel was going stag to my senior prom. No one asked me, and while I didn’t care so much about going, I knew my mother would be dreadfully disappointed if I didn’t go. (I didn’t quite realize at the time that going stag would actually disappoint her even more than me not going at all, but we’ll chalk that up to youthful naiveté.) As it turned out, I ended up having a blast, which is more than can be said from one of my friends who had a showy and hysterical breakup with her boyfriend, and later drunkenly vomited all over her prom dress.

Once I actually arrived at college, I found that there were so many things to see and do and learn that I didn’t actually care too much about dating (or drinking or drugging or screwing, for that matter). I did go out on a single date with a fellow student who drove buses for the university, but he showed up late and automatically assumed he was going to get laid just because he bought me pizza. He learned the hard way that I’ve never been a woman that you want to assume anything about. There was also the roguish Brit in my Italian class whose charming accent and green eyes meant I spent less time on learning Italian and more on learning him (which again led to a less than stellar grade, and you’d have thought I would have learned by then to keep my head in the game, but alas). Sadly, I was far too tongue-tied to actually speak to the man, so that never got off the ground.

However, there was also my friend Angela. Ah, Angela. Adorable and sassy and funny and oh-so straight as can be. I was too uncertain of myself to even dream of approaching her romantically. Instead, I followed her around like a puppy dog, keeping my feelings most firmly hidden. I never tried anything with her, despite the torch I carried for her in my poor little gawky heart.

Do I regret my agonized silence? Oh, honey.

Here is the part where we interrupt our tale of my non-existent love life to make sure that you understand that I am notoriously clueless when it comes to the romantic intentions of others. My friends and family have, with a great deal of patience, informed me of numerous occasions when prospective romantic partners attempted (and failed) to attract my notice. I am always completely blindsided at the very idea that so-and-so might have had the hots for me. Really, I am that obtuse. To get my attention you’d have to be willing to hold a neon sign up over your head that reads “Sabrina U R Cute & Can We Do It K THX” or something. My lack of sexual entanglements is due far more to this cluelessness than any sort of frigidness or snobbishness toward potential partners. Or as one of my dearest friends put it, “For such a smart woman you are pretty dumb sometimes.”

I met my would-be husband during my third year at college. He was a new graduate student in our department. After a few months of getting to know each other, he told me to my face that he liked me and asked me out directly (a necessary step, as we have established). He was smart and witty, along with a plethora of other qualifications that made for good boyfriend material. I was appreciative of the attention, and my neglected heart jumped at the chance. I wasn’t aware that anyone else might have wanted me, and I was too inexperienced and too shy to ask anyone out on my own. I was, as they say, ripe for the plucking. He plucked me, and I plopped right into a relationship that would last me most of my twenties.

While it is true that we had a good relationship together for a few years, we never did have much of a sex life. I don’t attribute that to me not enjoying sex with men, however. (Although, as I have only had sex with one man, I could be wrong on that account.) Mostly I attribute it to him not being as much of a tiger in bed as he seemed to think he was. For many years I just figured it was my fault. How would I know any differently? He was the first person I had sex with, so if, as he claimed, all of his former girlfriends were more than satisfied, the fact that I never had an orgasm must be my problem, right?

My boyfriend and I did get married after the inevitable moving in together, but it was a bad idea. My father died unexpectedly three months before the wedding, and I was devastated. My entire world was turned upside down, and I did not come out of the grieving period the same woman who went into it. Death changed me, and my husband never seemed very comfortable with the person I had morphed into. The post-parental-death Sabrina was blunter and less inclined to deal with other people’s failings. I had become, as one of my friends so succinctly put it, the No Bullshit Woman. And the No Bullshit Woman? She was not altogether sure that having only one lackluster lover for her entire life was really going to cut it.

After some discussion and negotiation on the part of my husband and myself, I took a lover. A woman lover. And it was fun. I liked it. In retrospect, she was a pretty selfish and unimaginative lover herself, but I enjoyed getting to know a woman’s body. I wasn’t orgasming, but I was having a blast. After a few months, my husband suggested that she come and live with us, and we moved into a larger home to accommodate a third adult.

Because she was now living with us, I decided that it was time to “officially” come out to my friends and family. I drove up to my mother’s house, nervous as hell, hoping that she would not freak out too badly at what I was going to tell her. I sat her down, and in my most serious voice told her that I needed to talk to her about something life-changing and important.

She looked very nervous.

I explained that what I had to tell her was difficult for me, and I hoped that she would listen and remain calm.

She started to look scared.

“Momma . . . I am a lesbian. Or at least bisexual. I am sleeping with a woman.”

Her mouth dropped open, and she stared at me for a moment before leaning forward and walloping me a good one on my upper arm.

“JESUS CHRIST! I thought you were going to tell me you had CANCER. I don’t give a shit if you are a lesbian! Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”

And that was that. My mother was not keen on the whole idea of the threesome—she was afraid it was going to lead to nothing good, and of course she was right, in that infuriating way that mothers are—but the fact that I was sleeping with a woman? She just did not care. She still doesn’t, and in fact, has photographs of my current family on her bulletin board at work. Coming out to my mother helped me to understand that all my mother had ever wanted for me was my happiness, and she did not care about my sexual orientation or anything else, so long as she knew that I was content in my life.

The rest of my family and my friends were fairly blasé about the whole thing. I come from liberal folk on both sides of the family tree, and if any of them discussed my sexual proclivities then they didn’t do so in front of me. On the contrary, my maternal side made a special effort to be very welcoming to my lover, and I will always be grateful for that. My friends were also firmly in the bleeding-heart-liberal camp, and were already aware that I liked women, and were not at all fazed by it. The only negative reaction I had came from one friend, who tried to dismiss my attraction to women. She suggested that the only reason I was attracted to women was because I was sexually unsatisfied with my husband. She went on to further suggest that if I had the “right” man to satisfy me that I would no longer want and/or need a woman. You’d think that this sort of attitude would only come from the stereotypical macho blowhard trying to get into a woman’s pants; but that’s where you’d be wrong. The funny thing is that she’s not the only woman who has suggested that to me. I’m not sure if it is due to plain old garden-variety homophobia, or if it is due to the mindset of the kind of woman who relies upon men to define her own self-worth; but it still throws me off whenever I hear it.

The downside of taking a lover was that my husband was not as comfortable with it as he said he was. After my lover moved in with us, we tried a threesome. That was a disaster. My lover was not bisexual, and wanted nothing to do with my husband sexually. He thought himself intellectually superior to her, and looked down on her. I was looking for someone who would take care of me both emotionally and sexually, and neither of them was up to that task. Our house fell apart, but I managed to drag myself out of the wreckage by sheer force of will.

When I made the choice to divorce my husband, I unsaddled the lover as well. Truth to be told, we were not suited for a long-term relationship. I had very little in common with her, and didn’t even really enjoy her company all that much. Despite her violent and angry reaction to my news, she managed to find herself a new lover within weeks. In retrospect, if not for the insistence of my husband that she come to live with us, I think our affair would have been fairly short-lived. I was being ignored sexually and emotionally by my husband and was so gratified to have any kind of attention paid to me at that point that I mistook my own gratefulness for love.

It was after I had moved out and started the divorce proceedings that I met my current wife. We met on the Internet. Not only was it on the Internet, we didn’t even have the decency to meet up on an Internet dating site. No, we met up on an
X-Files
fansite messaging board, and she was from Finland, of all weird places. She was straight. She was happily childless. She even had a former runway model turned psychology professor for a live-in boyfriend. But oh, she was funny, she was full of passionate justice, she flipped all of my switches and I hadn’t even seen what she looked like yet. None of it mattered. I wanted her. I did. I wanted her, no holds barred. And me, shy little gawky Sabrina, Sabrina who never dated, Sabrina who spent all of her free time reading and rarely drank and who had never traveled or done anything remotely daring? I went for it. I went for it, and I used every single weapon in my arsenal: I used my humor, I used my intelligence, I used my charm as the No Bullshit Woman and I went after that woman until I had her turned upside down and inside out. Who knew I had it in me? I was relentless. I ignored her when she told me she was straight and was not interested in women. I ignored her when she told me that it would be better for everyone if the former runway model and I got together and left her alone. I waved aside her insistence that she would rather die than ever be pregnant by assuring her that I would be responsible for the baby birthin’. I simply dug in my heels and waited out all of her protests and excuses and flashes of temper and finally, after nine months of a very, very bumpy ride, she gave in. She flew to California and right into my life. A year later, I followed her back to Finland.

So there I was, in an “official” lesbian relationship. No man around. We could go to Gay Pride and everything. I expected it to feel different than my straight relationship—and it did—but not for the reasons I was expecting. It felt different to be in a relationship where my partner actually loved all of my shortcomings instead of mocking them, where I was encouraged to be who I was instead of being molded into a person that made my partner look better, where the sex was mind-blowingly fantastic. It felt different to be in a relationship with someone who actually wanted children and was willing to work hard at parenting. The relationship felt different, but it wasn’t because my partner was a woman. It was because my partner was Kia. It wasn’t her sex or gender that made things different. It was because I had chosen the right person, the person who loved me for me, and who wanted to be with me.

I’ve heard other women say that they wished they had a wife. When I’ve asked why, they’ve said it is because they want a good coparent, or someone who is emotionally available, or someone who will be nurturing, or any number of things that have far more to do with socialization than biology, in my opinion. There is no denying that men and women are socialized into certain roles. However, I’ve known men who were fantastic parents, who do the cooking and cleaning, who are emotionally available. We associate those qualities with women, but my wife will be the first person to admit that she isn’t one to be pigeonholed into the good wife category. Neither am I. While to outside appearances my wife may seem to fall into the more “butch” role while I take on the “femme” role, that’s only via a casual glance. Anyone who knows us well knows that she’s the hands-on parent, the gentle one, the one who looks out for everyone’s safety, who feeds and nurtures the children, the one who keeps all of our finances in place and makes sure appointments are met, and who will spend hours on the floor playing. I’m much quicker than she is, full of drive and impatience, the hands-off parent who cleans and occasionally bakes something decadent and delicious, who sings lullabies and makes fart jokes and can’t remember what day it is, no less when the kids need to go to the dentist. A friend of mine has asked me on several occasions who the “boss” is in our family. The answer is that there is no boss. We don’t do stereotypes well in this house.